Field Notes
What the Herd Remembers
A matriarch in Samburu led her family to a waterhole she had not seen in nineteen years. I have been thinking about that walk ever since.
Read the entryNovelist · Storyteller · Retreat Host
Michael J.Chudzik
I write about the animals we turn into gods and the memory it takes to carry a people. Eleven years of that work became a novel called Ashanaya.
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Author of Ashanaya – The Elephant Who Became a God
The Novel
Ashanaya – The Elephant Who Became a God
A bull calf is born in a drought year and named for a river nobody living has seen. Over four decades he outlasts the herd that raised him, the hunters who track him, and the village that first feared him — until the people who once ran from his shadow begin leaving bread at the edge of his path.
Ashanaya is a novel about inheritance: what a creature carries, what a people remember, and the slow moment when memory becomes worship.
“A god is only an animal that outlived everyone who could explain it.”
Announcements
Retreats, readings and fire circles
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April 17 – 19, 2026
The Ashanaya Retreat: Three Days of Story and Silence
Ojai, California · Retreat
The Artist
I came to writing the long way around
I spent my twenties in wildlife conservation and my thirties trying to explain what I had seen there. Neither field notes nor reporting could hold it. What finally held it was a story about one elephant told over four decades, and the people who slowly changed their minds about him.
I work in longhand at a table my grandfather built, one season at a time. Between books I host retreats and fire circles, because a story read aloud to twenty people in a stone room does something no printed page has ever managed on its own.
- 2009
- Six months tracking herds in Samburu, Kenya
- 2014
- First draft of Ashanaya finished, then abandoned
- 2019
- Began hosting story-and-silence retreats
- 2025
- Ashanaya published in hardcover
From the Journal
Notes between the books
On Myth
The Door in the Stone
Every temple I have ever stood in was built around a doorway too small for the god it houses. That is the point of it.
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The Making Of
Eleven Years at the Desk
The first draft of Ashanaya was 640 pages and almost entirely wrong. Here is what the wrong version taught me.
Read the entryThe Ashanaya Circle
A reading group that meets on the first Sunday of each month, online and in living rooms, to work through one chapter, one myth, or one question at a time. Membership is free and the door stays open.